The ember of hope, so carefully kindled, was guttering. Morwen's lesson in precision felt a lifetime ago, a theory dissolved in the acid reality of the march. They had been walking for hours, though time in the Echoing was a fluid, untrustworthy thing. The landscape had shifted from rolling obsidian hills to a forest of petrified trees, their branches frozen in silent agony against the swirling sky. The air here was thick and still, the psychic hum muted, as if the very resonance had been suffocated.
Morwen moved with a new tension, her head constantly on a swivel, her grey eyes scanning the skeletal branches above. The professional curiosity was gone, replaced by a hunter's wariness.
"This place is quiet," Kaelan murmured, the first words he'd dared speak since the lesson. "Too quiet."
"Quiet is not safe," she replied, her voice a low thrum. "Quiet means something has claimed this territory and scared everything else away. Or eaten it."
She stopped abruptly, holding up a hand. Ahead, the petrified forest opened into a clearing. And in the center of the clearing stood their destination.
It wasn't a structure of crystal or basalt. It was a cube of absolute, matte blackness, twenty feet to a side. It didn't reflect the sickly light of the sky; it devoured it. Looking at it felt like looking into a hole in reality itself. There were no seams, no doors, no markings. It was simply… negation.
"There," Morwen said, her voice hushed with a mixture of triumph and dread. "The Unwritten Vault."
Kaelan felt a deep, instinctual revulsion. The archivist in him, the part that craved stories and knowledge, recoiled from this absolute void. "What is it?"
"A theory," she breathed, her eyes fixed on the black cube. "A place where an event was so catastrophic, so world-ending, that its memory didn't just form a lock… it inverted. It didn't create a scar; it created an anti-memory. A void that repels all resonance. Weavers can't even sense it. Our senses slide right off. But a Scribe…" She finally looked at him, and the hunger was back in her eyes, sharper than ever. "A Scribe doesn't just read resonance. You can read its absence. You can read the silence."
The implication settled over him like a shroud. She hadn't brought him here to open a lock. She'd brought him to read a tombstone for a dead event.
"What happened here?" he asked, his throat dry.
"No one knows. That's the point. Whatever it was, it was erased so completely that not even its echo remains. Only the shape of its erasure." She gestured with her chin toward the cube. "Read the void, Scribe. Tell me what isn't there."
The command was insane. It was like asking him to describe the shape of a hole by feeling its edges. He approached the cube, each step feeling heavier. The air grew colder the closer he got, a cold that had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of nothingness.
He stopped an arm's length away. The surface of the cube wasn't a surface. It was a boundary. He could feel the resonance of the world—the hum of the petrified trees, the distant whisper of the sky—simply… stop. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff where sound itself fell away.
He held his hand out, not daring to touch it. He closed his eyes, trying to do as Morwen had taught him. To listen. To feel for the edges.
But there was nothing to feel. Only a profound, pulling emptiness. It wasn't a passive silence; it was an active negation. His mind, his Scribe's sense, scrabbled for purchase and found none. It was terrifying. It was the feeling of his own internal voids given external, geometric form.
"I… I can't," he whispered, opening his eyes. "There's nothing to read."
"There is!" Morwen insisted, her voice tight with frustration. "The nothingness is the data! What caused it? What is missing? Push harder!"
Driven by her need and his own dawning horror, Kaelan focused. He pushed his awareness against the void, not seeking a memory, but seeking the contours of the absence.
And the void pushed back.
It wasn't an attack. It was an unraveling. The pulling emptiness didn't just repel his sense; it began to unmake it. The carefully controlled golden warmth of the sunlight memory he'd recorded earlier began to fray at the edges, its resonance dissolving into the static of the void. He felt a dizzying lurch, a sensation of falling into a place with no up or down.
He tried to pull back, but it was too late. The void had a grip on him. It wasn't reading him. It was erasing him.
Panic seized him. He couldn't break the connection. His own power, his ability to Record and sense, was being used as a conduit for the anti-memory to bleed into him.
No. No. No.
The thought was a desperate prayer. He couldn't lose more. He couldn't become this nothingness.
Instinct, raw and survival-driven, took over. He couldn't pull back, so he did the only thing he could think of. He Recorded.
But he didn't Record the void. That was impossible. Instead, he focused inward, on the one thing the void was actively destroying: the golden, peaceful memory of sunlight on a pond. He grabbed hold of it, not to preserve it, but to amplify it. He poured every ounce of his will into it, making it brighter, warmer, more real. He weaponized the memory, not as a blast, but as a shield—a defiant, resonant shout against the consuming silence.
He Played it not outwards, but inwards, into the connection itself.
For a split second, light and void clashed within him. It was agony—a silent, psychic detonation.
The connection shattered.
Kaelan was thrown backward, landing hard on the petrified ground. He gasped, his mind reeling, his senses scrambled. The golden memory was gone, completely annihilated in the conflict. But so was the void's grip.
He lay there, panting, staring up at the swirling sky. The Tax had not been demanded. He had paid it upfront, in full, with the complete destruction of a recorded echo.
Morwen was at his side in an instant, not helping him up, but crouching, her eyes blazing. "What did you see? What was it?"
He turned his head, looking at her, seeing not an ally but a dangerous fanatic. "Nothing," he croaked, the truth a bitter ash in his mouth. "I saw nothing. It's not a vault. It's a wound. And it's… hungry."
Her face fell, but only for a second before the calculating mask slipped back into place. She looked from him to the black cube, a new speculation in her eyes. "A hunger can be exploited," she murmured, almost to herself.
Kaelan closed his eyes. He had faced a monster that didn't want to kill him, but to unmake him. And his guide, his teacher, saw it only as a potential tool.
He had never felt more alone. The ember of hope was not just guttering; it was buried in the cold ash of the Unwritten Vault. He was learning the hardest lesson yet: some silences were not meant to be broken.